WE ARE SCIENTISTS Kicks Off 2023 With “Settled Accounts,” Premiered via Under The Radar
“Designed as the nighttime counterpart to the bright, sunny Huffy, Lobes pulses to neon-lit nocturnal rhythms and percolating analog synths. Lobes might be designed to be played under cover of the night but it’s as celebratory as it is moody thanks to the duo of Keith Murray and Chris Cain’s dedication to hooks and nervy guitar.” – AV Club
“’Settled Accounts’ finds the band once again hitting the dancefloor, delivering a track loaded with syncopated guitar lines, shimmering synth textures, and a vibrant hook on the chorus. The band’s penchant for driving dance punk guitars is on full display, but they couple their rock edges with glossy production and soaring synth-backed melodies, adding a sense of neon-soaked euphoria to their sound.” – Under The Radar
Kicks Off 2023 With “Settled Accounts”
Their Self-Proclaimed “Funkiest Tune Yet”
Premieres via Under The Radar
New Album Lobes Out January 20 via Masterswan Recordings
Album Release Show at NYC’s Brooklyn Made on January 20
Photo credit: Dan Monick
JANUARY 6, 2022 (NEW YORK, NY) — “It’s nice that things have come full-circle,” says We Are Scientists vocalist/guitarist Keith Murray about the band’s groovy, synth-laced indie track “Settled Accounts” (which premiered via Under The Radar). “Strident old Keith would have argued that funk was the one true musical genre. And here we are, with our funkiest tune yet.” Taken from their eighth official studio album Lobes (release date: January 20, 2023via Masterswan Recordings), the track brims with chiming, funk-infused guitars while its epicly soaring chorus begs for a singalong. “When I was a younger, more brazen guy, I was incredibly steadfast in my beliefs,” he adds in regards to the meaning of the song. “Everything I liked was not just ‘enjoyable,’ but ‘categorically good,’ the people I hung out with were not just ‘fun people,’ but the ‘best gang,’ the ideas I subscribed to were not just ‘interesting,’ but ‘fundamentally correct.’ These days, I’m just way less sure about everything.”
Murray knows he can still be a “bullheaded fool” who will stridently argue that some particular genre of music (Country Pop) is “inherently dumb,” or that Matt Stone and Trey Parker’s irreverently classic sports film BASEketball is probably the “most important cinematic contribution of the 1990s,” but he confidently admits he never believes he’s actually, “objectively right” about anything anymore, adding, “The more I live, the more I experience, and the more people deliver rhetorical smack-downs on the daily, the more I just realize I don’t know anything. Anything! All of what I thought was rigorous intellectualization has kind of gotten me nowhere. I might as well just surrender and go with it.”
The funky/indie-pop “Settled Accounts” arrives hot on the heels of their previous breakneck singles from 2022 (“Operator Error,” “Less From You,” and “Lucky Just To Be Here”) and precedes the upcoming release of their eighth album Lobes and album release show (happening at Brooklyn, NYC’s Brooklyn Made) on January 20th. The band will also be announcing more US dates in the coming months following the band’s UK and Europe Show Lobes Tour this Spring.
The lyrics for Lobes were written over a stretch of two to three years. Though the origins of the first songs began around the same time as their 2021 album Huffy, they exist in entirely different musical universes. Lobes is expected to see the lovable and dynamic duo at their most playful and creatively free, continuing to expand upon the band’s feel-good indie rock sound by exploring more of their own input on production. As Murray tells Psychedelic Baby Magazine, “We recorded Huffy and a bit of Lobes during the lockdown, at the very beginning of the pandemic. We had just started recording Huffy when everything shut down, and the owner of the studio found himself trapped in Europe for the entirety of quarantine, and we ended up having access to the recording space for longer than we had anticipated. It gave us the opportunity to really dig down and get exploratory with our production techniques,” he adds. “A lot of our favorite productions ended up being the songs that we ultimately earmarked for Lobes, and when we started writing the rest of the record, we definitely wrote with an eye toward creating songs that were complementary to that sound – more electronic, dancier, ambitious in their production and arrangements, but still easy as hell to down like a spectacular, fruity cocktail on a light-up dance floor.”
1. “Operator Error“
2. “Dispense With Sentiment”
3. “Human Resources”
4. “Lucky Just To Be Here“
5. “Turn It Up”
6. “Settled Accounts“
7. “Here Goes”
8. “Parachute”
9. “Less From You“
10. “Miracle of ’22”
Lobes by We Are Scientists is due out January 20, 2023 via Masterswan Recordings. The new single “Settled Accounts” is out now on all DSPs. The album is available to pre order from the band’s webstore, including on Limited Edition “Black Lobe in a Cathode Blue Bath” LP. Also found in the We Are Scientists webstore are limited edition Big Huff guitar pedals (selling out quickly), a brand new drinking cat pin, and a deck of Tarot Cards featuring Keith Murray’s drawings and a decadent box and layout by Texan designer Rebecca King.
